Category: Instruments

Hi everyone! As you might remember, our last post was the end of a series of entries meant to summarize everything that had happened in instrument-land so far. So now that catching up is done, here’s what has happened lately!

At the end of the last version I was getting into the groove—and feeling determined.
I had managed to vittle down the instrument backlog to half! I though surely I could do even better! Let’s start digging into the meat of things and, get serious.

Now we were going to do things seriously, so therefore this was a pretty big version!
It’s called:

However right in the middle of this version came GCI!
I was part of the contest as a mentor this year (for the first time) so naturally I had some instrument tasks ready for our participants. They were pretty popular, with a lot of tickets being added or improved by the participants. So, this is how serious we got for GCI:

The majority of these where done during autumn ’17 and the first half of ’18. The whole thing would have been finished in the summer, hadn’t May, June and July ’18 been the hottest summerever! I just couldn’t think, so I took a break until August and then I finished dealing with the last few stragglers.

This version ended up including 58 tickets: the largest to date!
What happens now? Well, at the end of the “Let’s get serious” version I noticed some issues with families and the like, but that’s a topic for the next blog post!

It’d been almost 2 years since I started, and I’ve managed to get quite a lot done! Here is a graph that illustrates the progress (notice the the jump in added tickets during GCI period, when the participants actually added them faster than I could close them!):

And with this we have finally caught up! So hopefully all future blogs from now on will be posted soon after the relevant versions are released.

I also decided to close the tambouras (strings) version, as after much delay there wasn’t really much progress on it. I had started work on these way back in January, adding the Tamburica instruments (see Instruments part two).
However, by the time ASP came to an end it had became clear to me that I had to move on from dwelling on this, to feel like there was progress and avoid burning out.

It’s time for Instruments again!
Now that I was allowed to create fix versions I set about creating such fix versions! (And also, retroactively (re)creating previous batches where these seemed logical.) This also meant creating JIRA Tickets for instruments I had already added without tickets, like the Taonga pūoro instruments.

By now, I was also starting to see the limits of the relationships between instruments we already had, so I was already thinking about what relationships could be added to improve the way we link things. As such, I created a topic to discuss some ideas I had (Reader beware! This is an early and now outdated idea-thread! (More on this in a later post!))

tamburica instrument family tree By now I was starting to get a bit more comfortable in my role as Instrument Inserter. I went about doing a bit more in-depth research, especially for the tamburica, and I made a post on the forum where I asked for input researching these instruments.
Eventually I mean to come back to this group of instruments (and in fact this is what I am doing currently), expanding the family tree I’ve been working on, which is why this “fix” version is still open.

Initially, what I found to be the hardest part of adding instruments was actually the addition of aliases. It was a cumbersome, time consuming and annoying part, and I often clamoured for someone to write some sort of Batch Alias script. Then, in March, loujine came in like a superhero with a batch alias script! Now thanks to this script I can add aliases en masse, which has helped me tremendously!

After reosarevok fixed INST-723, I could link hybrids with the instruments they were hybrids of, therefore a batch of “hybrid” instruments came next.

Improvement

By this time a community discussion came out about the use of disambiguations and descriptions (instrument exclusive fields, which, unlike disambiguations, are translatable), with some users suggesting they were too long, some pointing out issues with translating and yet others suggesting the description field should be dropped altogether. While this discussion didn’t reach a clear resolution, it’s definitely something we should revisit later.

Hi everyone! I’m CatQuest, the Endeavouring MusicBrainz Instrument Inserter. I’ve been meaning to write a post or two about this for a while, but now finally everything is in order!

As some of you may know, I have “officially” taken over instrument additions from reosarevok. I suggested this way back in June 2016 because a) reo was already overworked enough between doing Style, handling support, dealing with social media, and other things, and b) as a consequence of this, the Instrument Requests queue had grown unmanageably large.

Initially I started without grouping, components, or “fix versions”, but later I’ve been allowed to organise everything to my liking and so, I’ve gone back and retroactively added tickets for initial batches, modelled on freso’s ORG tickets.

So without further ado: Here is a list of the instrument tickets I solved from my initiate appointment in July 2016 to roughly October: